"All you need is love"? Not according to Schopenhauer.

The other day I was presenting Schopenhauer’s ideas about love and thought it would be a good idea to post some of them as well.

One might wonder why Schopenhauer, well known for him  optimism and sympathy towards humanity,  picked “love” as his object of studies. That’s because he thought love has a very important meaning in the human life. We tent to idealize it when in fact it is just a sexual instinct. What purpose does it have? Only one, prolongation of the human race. It doesn’t care about personal interests of individuals, about happiness and so on. For that Schopenhauer called it an invention, an illusion and deception of nature. The poets across history described love and the longing for it, which can’t be done completely. It’s just too big of a force to try to exhaust it’s content.

So there we have it, a few words about Schopenhauer’s vision of love.

Dark Souls OST

Today I would like to present music from a videogame called “Dark Souls”. It was released in 2011 and was well received by both, the press and the gamers. What stand out is it difficulty level, which is just brutal, unforgiving and ruthless. The back cover of the game says “prepare to die” so really, what can you expect? And why music from a videogame and not just form an album? It think that a lot of people don’t appreciate this form of entertainment, categorizing it as childish and utterly useless. I find it completely wrong because we can find examples of games that could be considered art. Putting that aside, let’s concentrate on music. It was composed by Motoi Sakuraba (Japanese musician, arranger and compositor) and reflects the game atmosphere tremendously well, although it appears mainly during boss fights. Without further ado, here are two tracks.